Abbie's Story -- i

I hate to say it but I'm busy, more busy, I can't help but think, than a man who's been retired for ten years should be. Rather than pressuring myself to come up with something new every day on this old blog, I'm vacationing from that schedule by running a story that's somewhat famous around here, in a fashion that it's rarely told, a fashion that gives the story the shape Abbie Gardner herself gave it in this memoir of her life. Her story, her way, is one of the finest stories of forgiveness and reconciliation I know. But the only way to get there is a sad and thorny path. This is the first segment of Abbie's story, the way she wanted it told.

Without the horror, the blood, the grief, the lifelong sadness, there could not have been the triumph. That’s the story line here.

Abbie Gardner was just thirteen when her family set down a perilous homestead out front of the wave of white newcomers to a region of the country few Euro-Americans had ever seen: Iowa’s northwest corner.

Years after Inkpaduta and his Wahpakute (Waa-pa-koot’-ee) band wreaked travesty on the Gardner family and the thirty-some others they also murdered, Abbie wrote a memoir about what she’d suffered at the hands of those who’d murdered her mother, her father, and her little brother, and then held her in frightful bondage for about four months.

Her memoir, The Spirit Lake Massacre and the Captivity of Miss Abbie Gardner (1885), told the story and contributed to a genre that had already gathered fascinated readers here and abroad, ever since the publication of a 17th-century predecessor, A Narrative of the Capture and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, (1682), a memoir subtitled The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. [Rowlandson’s cover]

Rowlandson’s Capture and Restoration is often considered America’s first “best-seller,” a white woman kidnapped and abused by hideous warriors in bright red war-paint. It was also the progenitor of a genre scholars refer to as “captivity narratives,” stories that attract audiences by what is often unthinkably repulsive and therefore undeniably fascinating.

Abbie Gardner Sharp (she married soon after her freedom was purchased) likely knew something of the popularity of captivity narratives. If she didn’t, someone in her acquaintance would have. That she did, however, doesn’t mean the book she wrote—and later peddled at the scene of the crimes—was just dime novel material. The Spirit Lake Massacre is an honest, heartfelt and fascinating read—of both tale and teller.

That the Spirit Lake Massacre is common knowledge among those who live in my neighborhood is probably not a valid assumption. For descendants of Iowa pioneers like the Gardners, the dark tales that rose from Manifest Destiny are easier not to remember. Most Iowans know little about the Ioways, even less about how it is the Ioway tribe has lived in Oklahoma for almost 200 years.

Some background is relevant. Be warned: it’s bloody.

In March of 1857, the Gardner family had just moved to land in a region unsettled by Euro-Americans. They were the cutting edge of a cultural wave that had begun in 1620 at the Plymouth Colony: white folks assuming the land to be free and open for settlement, even though their squatting threatened the indigenous who lived there.

Winter never departed that particular March, the temperatures as low as temperatures can dip here, deep snow sharply crusted to make walking any distance almost impossible.

For the Gardners, a band of Indians coming to their door that day was not rare. Neither was talk. When the Wahpekutes came, Abbie’s father picked up his rifle; but her mother, Abbie remembers, told him to put it down. “If we have to die,” she told him, “let us now die innocent of shedding blood.” Thus, the Gardners allowed Inkpaduta’s men into their cabin and cooked up pancakes for breakfast.

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For the record: Inkpaduta’s Wahpakute band were one of four distinct lingual branches of Dakota people. History suggests that the Dakotas, along with the Nakota and Lakota, once shared a common language with many other tribes (among them the Mandan, Crows, Winnebago, Omaha, and Iowa). The name “Santee” makes a broader reference to those Dakota people who lived in the eastern edges of what Euro-Americans called Dakota Territory. Inkpaduta’s band were Dakotas, but more specifically, they were Wahpakutes, and would have considered themselves as such.